The Logstash Lines: 2.2 Release, Dynamic Config Reloading

Welcome back to The Logstash Lines! In these weekly posts, we'll share the latest happenings in the world of Logstash and its ecosystem.

This week, we are super excited to report that dynamic config reloading feature has been merged to master. With this feature, any config changes made to the file will be picked up dynamically, and the internal pipeline restarted to apply these changes. This means Logstash as a process does not need to be restarted to update configuration.

To enable this, run LS with:

bin/logstash -f config_file --auto-reload --reload-interval 2

--reload-interval is how often LS watches the config file for changes, defaulting to 3 seconds

This is also getting back ported to 2.3 release, so look out for that!

2.2.0 and 2.1.2 Release

As part of release bonanza, LS 2.2.0 and 2.1.2 was released with new pipeline architecture being the highlight among other features/bugs. See blog for details. A user reported a bug with the new pipeline which affects a subset of LS filters (metrics, multiline, etc). These filters use flushing logic to periodically emit events which are in-flight. This has been fixed and we're targeting a 2.2.1 release this week.

LS Metrics

The aim of this project is to expose internal metrics of Logstash using an API. Follow this issue for more details.

Metrics Store: Internal implementation has been changed to use namespaced keys which allows for better filtering from API directly (#4492).

Metrics Store returns a structured hash which can be directly used by consumers like API (#4529)

Others:

JDBC Plugin: Investigating use of stored procedures for MySQL database

JSON Lines codec: Improved performance by using buffered tokenizer to split on lines instead of using line codec (#17)

Many exciting things are in store for Logstash and we'll talk about that in detail at our user conference - Elastic{ON} '16. Our entire engineering team will be at this conference, so please come by and say hi! We'd love to talk about roadmap, issues and upcoming features. See you in San Francisco!